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Schuco & MicroRacers >
MicroRacers

With this small, heavy, beautifully realized MicroRacer, Schuco, in 1954, began the single most successful “family” of products in its history. All share the same running gear: simple open-wheeled racing die-cast components, tires, rubber bumper, clockwork and so forth! Done in the die-cast-making process, many small and intricate shapes can be made fairly rapidly and with great accuracy. The basic metal component is zinc. All Lilliput Micro-Racer castings are hand-trimmed, burnished, pickled, and then primed and painted with automotive paints to the RAL color standards. One of the great Schuco innovations was that you could “freewheel” the Micro-Racers with the spring wound or unwound, without damage to the gears or mainspring, rolling it forward or backwards! The name “Micro” came not from the diminutive size of the cars (1:45 scale), but rather from the micro-threaded steering adjustment, usually the tailpipe of the car. This meant, that so long as the tires were round, one could set hairpin-sharp courses. The whole key to these little marvels was that they were: tiny, heavy, and had steel mainsprings. Couple that with sticky, fat rubber tires for directional stability, and you could go screaming across your parquet floors at speeds (actual) up to 35mph! And so that Mother wouldn’t yell at us when they hit the furniture, all Micro’s were equipped with rubber bumpers on their noses.